Editor's Note

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The Berkeley Planning Journal chronicles not only the recent debates in our field, but also the life of our department. In recent years, the Urban Fringe blog has provided a constantly changing picture of the interests and travels of the DCRP community, while the Journal itself continues to provide an annual snapshot of the conversation in planning theory and practice. The former provides a concise but informed tweet or postcard from the ground, and the latter continues to be a consistent letter from home.

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Assessing the Equity of Changing Travel Behaviors→

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Assessing the Equity of Changing Travel Behaviors

This research makes the radical claim that there is a social equity differences between the travel patterns of disadvantaged and non- disadvantaged groups. This research then proposes and applies an innovative methodology to help planners assess the social equity of policy interventions that result in changing travel behaviors. This methodology distinguishes between outcome equity and impact equity, proffers non-parametric and parametric statistical tests for identifying the existence (or absence) of both types of equity, and presents a theoretical framework of ranked scenarios, applies this methodology to survey data collected after a disruption in retail land use patterns in post-soviet Prague to both identify equity model.

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LEED-ND and Livability Revisited→

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LEED-ND and Livability Revisited

This study examines LEED-ND’s criteria for Neighborhood Pattern and Design (NPD). LEED-ND was developed as a system for rating new neighborhoods on the sustainability of their planning. However, it has increasingly been adopted by cities as a de facto measure of “livable” neighborhood design and used to accelerate development processes. We hypothesize that these criteria do not area is Temescal, a gentrifying neighborhood in Oakland, CA. livability very highly. Furthermore, residents consistently rated and ranked NPD characteristics quite differently than did LEED-ND, system. We propose that a single set of weighted, prescriptive desired amenities of different communities.

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The "Mortgage Consensus” and the Housing Bubble: Revisiting the Post-Fordism Debate→

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The "Mortgage Consensus” and the Housing Bubble: Revisiting the Post-Fordism Debate

Over half a decade after the collapse of home prices in 2006, and with no shortage of books and essays on the ensuing crisis, the place of the housing bubble in political economic remains contested. Preoccupations of scholars have been high levels of income inequality model, through this brief essay I hope to highlight the usefulness of a debate that preoccupied geographers between the 1970s and 1990s, and suggest how theoretical and empirical work since, as well as the illuminating shock of the Great Recession, should compel us to interpret the political economic function of the housing bubble.

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Is Rail Worth It?→

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Much has been made recently of Los Angeles’s transformation to a transit- friendly city. A speaker at this spring’s Transit & Cities conference at UC Berkeley, hosted by the Institute of Urban and Regional Development, lamented the increasingly prohibitive housing prices in Downtown LA, even as there is demand for commuters to live closer to work and spend less time in their cars. Yet the traditional view of transit riders of “necessity” versus “choice” pits low-income bus riders against more affluent rail riders and raises questions about the much higher cost per rider of rail. What can planning scholars and practitioners do to inform and enlighten the political process around rail and bus development? What are the metrics by which we should evaluate investment in different forms of transit infrastructure before and after it is built? What should be the relationship between equity, cost, and political feasibility? The BPJ editors posed these questions to Professor Martin Wachs of UCLA and Professor Ethan Elkind of UC Berkeley after their recent IURD Transit & Cities lecture on Elkind’s 2014 book, Railtown: The Fight for the Los Angeles Metro Rail and the Future of the City (UC Press). The talk focused on the history of rail politics in LA and served as a useful springboard for further discussion in this journal on the role of planners today in promoting equitable mobility in cities.

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A Conversation with Manuel Castells→

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On October 25, 2013, the Berkeley Planning Journal hosted Professor Manuel Castells in a round-table discussion with doctoral and master’s students from the Department of City and Regional Planning. Professor Castells is a leading expert worldwide in the social sciences. He is Professor Emeritus of City and Regional Planning and of Sociology at UC Berkeley, where he taught from 1979 to 2003. The Spanish sociologist is a prominent scholar globalization, and information society, and currently holds the Wallis Annenberg Chair in Communication Technology and Society at the University of Southern California.

The round-table discussion coincided with Professor Castells’s lecture at the College of Environmental Design entitled “Space of Flows and Space of Places in Networked Social Movements” and follows the publication of his most recent book, Networks of Outrage and Hope (2012). Both the lecture and the discussion focused on Castells’s most recent work on new forms of social movements and protests that are erupting across the world, from the Arab uprisings to the indignadas of Spain and the Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States. Jake Wegmann served as the discussion moderator.

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Still-Life Architecture→

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Still-Life Architecture

Turkey’s biggest villa city eco-project located near Çatalca in İstanbul fails in fulfilling the aspects of an ecological planning and moreover becomes a land piece of rows of summer houses on a resource protection area. Despite its large scale planning, this gated villa town has recently turned into a ghost town and a still life architecture without much notice. However, there are remedies for transforming this area into an ecological park by implanting renewable energies.

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Bikenomics: How Bicycling Can Save the Economy By Elly Blue→

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Planning often prioritizes transportation projects based on quantified costs and benefits to the community. Recognizing decision-making standard, in Bikenomics Elly Blue delivers a pro-bike argument with which planners and bicycle activists might be familiar, but she supports this argument with facts and figures that will make city comptrollers take notice. A Portlandbased
writer and bicycle advocate, Elly Blue backs her claims with research that spans popular blog writing, advocacy organization reports, and academic articles in a way that informs, engages, and entertains. She invites an understanding that individuals, businesses, and cities all benefit from more and safer bicycling in their communities.

Bikenomics is largely organized around common refrains about the impossibility of making bicycling a coequal mode in the US transportation system. In the first few chapters, Blue tackles the high cost of automobiles and car ownership relative to the bicycle. Costs are borne, Blue argues, not only by individuals who must spend a high proportion of their income on transportation, but by all taxpayers who must pay the long-term debt incurred by borrowing to build roads. On the other hand, investment in bicycle infrastructure costs a fraction to build and maintain and, as argued later, bring local economic benefits that a new highway interchange cannot.

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What Lies Ahead for the American Metropolis in the Age of Inversion?→

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The Great Inversion by Alan Ehrenhalt is, at this point, a couple of years old. The book’s outstanding virtue is that it has clearly named and defined what the author maintains is the most important high-level process restructuring metropolitan space across the United States: inversion. As he conceptualizes it, inversion is the reoccupation of metropolitan cores and favorably located inner suburbs by the wealthy, a dramatic reversal from their penchant for decamping to the metropolitan fringe for the better part of a century. Helpfully, inversion, which might be called a process of gentrification at the metropolitan, rather than neighborhood, scale, and one that unfolds in lockstep with a simultaneous devalorization of the exurban fringe, is described in terms of the type rather than the simply the number of people who have swapped their relative locations. This helps us distinguish Boston and Paris, both of which have lost population but gained economic vitality and housing units in the last 100 years, from Detroit and Cleveland, which have lost all three in recent decades.

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Infrastructure Planning and Finance: A Smart and Sustainable Guide for Local Practitioners By Vicki Elmer and Adam Leigland→

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Over the past decade, local, state, federal, and international entities have stressed the deteriorating state of infrastructure in the United States. While funding has often been named as the culprit, in Infrastructure Planning and Finance: A Smart and Sustainable Guide for Local Practitioners, Elmer and Leigland argue that the current failures in US infrastructure can also be attributed to a lack of coordination at the local, regional, and national scales to ensure that infrastructure investments reflect the dynamic and interconnected nature of today’s society. This textbook provides a historical and current analysis of infrastructure in the United States, clearly identifying the array of challenges and proposing an integrated vision to shift thinking on traditional infrastructure paradigms. Elmer and Leigland look at infrastructure systems, challenges facing them, and potential solutions exclusively from the perspective of the local practitioner, by which the authors mean anyone from a city planner to a director of public works to a mayor. The authors do not assume a baseline understanding of infrastructure planning and finance. Rather, they use an approachable format to provide a basic understanding of policy, regulation, and the range of systems that build the base for infrastructure in the United States.

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Toxic Schools: High-Poverty Education in New York and Amsterdam By Bowen Paulle→

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Bowen Paulle’s Toxic Schools is an often-riveting transatlantic comparative ethnography that focuses on the psychosocial dynamics of high-poverty high schools in New York City and Amsterdam. Paulle, a native New Yorker and US-trained sociologist, is a professor of social and behavioral sciences at the University of Amsterdam. His work builds not only on sociological theory, but also on public health and epidemiological research. Paulle argues that the heightened levels of violence and stress in highpoverty schools and neighborhoods are toxic to the health, well-being, and life trajectory of both students and teachers. His novel approach to toxicity offers rich material and insights for planning scholars and practitioners who work at the intersection of public health, education, and poverty studies.

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Keys to the City: How Economics, Institutions, Social Interaction, and Politics Shape Development By Michael Storper→

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Why do some city regions grow and others decline over time, and what are the defining local differences that make it so? Such complex questions are what motivate Michael Storper, one of the most cited economic geographers, in his new book, Keys to the City: How Economics, Institutions, Social Interaction, and Politics Shape Development. This wide-ranging work is hard to pigeonhole into the disciplinary boxes of fields—geography, economic history, and economics—that typically deal with such questions. Indeed, in Keys to the City, Storper is interested in connections between the different disciplinary optics.

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The Hidden Potential of Sustainable Neighborhoods: Lessons from Low-Carbon Communities By Harrison Fraker→

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The terms “low-carbon” and “zero-carbon” are now frequently bandied about in planning dialogues regarding sustainable neighborhood development. These terms—used in the context of neighborhood design and planning—possess increasing currency given the problem of climate change. In the past, zero-energy goals have been perceived as desirable but lofty and difficult or even impossible for planners and designers to achieve. However, in an era of adaptation to climate change, resilient infrastructure and built form is both warranted and necessary. Harrison Fraker—a pioneer researcher and professor in passive solar, daylighting, and other sustainable design techniques—presents this imperative with striking resolve in his new book. Fraker attempts to raise awareness about the “hidden potential” of sustainable infrastructure through an analysis of several best practice case studies in Europe. Exploring progressive neighborhoods at the forefront of environmental design in Sweden and Germany, the book outlines how planners, architects, and urban designers can design and build zero-carbon neighborhoods. Fraker chooses the four German and Swedish case studies specifically because the energy and performance data were available for the purposes of comparative evaluation. The case studies ultimately indicate that low-carbon communities are no longer a futuristic fantasy, but are now a reality.

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